Michael sighed. “I’ve got a retirement dinner tonight—for a guy I used to work with in the city—but maybe I could drop by later. Unless you’d prefer I didn’t.”
“No, I’d like that.”
He hesitated. “And I’m free all day tomorrow.”
“Good,” I said softly, “so am I.”
I picked up the paperweight from Daria’s desk and turned it over in my hands. It was made of smooth, rounded glass, and inside were droplets of colored oil that drifted and curled and meandered in free-form patterns.
“There’s something else,” I said slowly.
“Mmm.”
“I think I know who killed Pepper.”
“You what?”
I told him everything I’d learned, starting with Tina’s remarks that afternoon and working backwards to my visit to the Royal Arms Motel.
“Pepper broke off with him a couple of days before she was killed. Apparently he was quite upset. It wasn’t just some meaningless fling. He’d wanted to marry her.”
“Where’d you learn that?”
“Andy told me. Seems he talked to Jim the Saturday before Pepper was killed.”
“Andy, your husband?”
I bit my lip. “He called yesterday.”
“I see.”
My marriage was not a subject I wanted to discuss right then; murder was far less complicated. “Jim is such a gentle guy,” I said, frowning. “I still can’t believe it.”
“This isn’t easy for you, I know. But you’ve got to remember that killers come in all sizes and shapes. They buy groceries, drive cars, go to the movies. They have lives, even family and friends, just like the rest of us. Now tell me how I can contact this witness who saw the car by the Dumpster.”
“I can t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“She’s . . . sort of in this country illegally. She doesn’t want the police to find her.”
“Kate,” he said, his voice rising with exasperation, “we’re a small, suburban police force, not the INS. You think I’m going to take her down to the dock and throw her on a boat? I promise you, the subject won’t even come up.”
“Still, I’ll have to ask her first.”
“Well do it,” he snapped, “and get back to me ASAP.” Then his voice softened. “And remember, we don’t know anything for sure. It may turn out it wasn’t Jim after all.”
<><><>
At Daria’s suggestion we went to her place after work instead of out on the town. “It’s such a beautiful evening,” she said, “it doesn’t make sense to spend it huddled in some crowded, smelly room. And I have a bottle of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay all iced and ready to go.”
It was a beautiful night, warm without being oppressively hot, and the air was flagrant with the sweet scent of jasmine. But the real reason I agreed so readily was that I thought we would have a better chance to talk privately if we weren’t yelling to be heard over the din of Friday night happy hour. And much as I dreaded it, I knew there were some pretty weighty things that needed to be said.
“Daria, I have to talk to you,” I began as soon as we were through the front door. It was probably best, I thought, to jump in with both feet and get it over with before we got all cozy. “It’s about Pepper’s murder.”
“Not that again!”
“It’s important. I wouldn’t be telling you this, except that you’re my friend and I think you need to know.” The words came in a rush, the way Anna’s did whenever she was forced to confess her role in some transgression.
“Let me change my shoes first,” Daria said. “My feet are killing me. Go get the wine. It’s on the bottom shelf of the fridge, there’s some brie in there too. We can sit out on the patio.”
I found the wine and opened it, then got out two glasses. I was looking for the crackers when Daria joined me. She poured two glasses of wine, then took a sip of hers. “Now what about Pepper?”
“It’s about Jim too,” I said slowly.
She smoothed one eyebrow with the tip of her finger, but her expression remained unchanged.
“I think he may have been involved.”
“Really? What makes you think that?”
I turned back to get the brie, hoping to buy time; choosing the right words wasn’t going to be easy. How did you go about telling your best friend that her husband was unfaithful—and a murderer?
And that’s when I saw the picture on the refrigerator door. It was in one of those clear plastic holders with a magnetic back. A photograph I’d seen dozens of times. Daria with her two boys, standing under the big oak in their front yard. Three fresh, smiling faces. Only this time I saw something I’d missed before, something that caused my blood to run cold.
“It’s on the left,” Daria said, “next to the milk I think. You can’t miss it.”
Slowly, I turned around to face her. “Oh, God, Daria, I was wrong. It wasn’t Jim—it was you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You killed Pepper.”
I waited for her to deny it, to laugh at me or get angry. But she stood motionless, without uttering a word.
“The earring the police found—it wasn’t one of Pepper’s, it was yours. I thought it looked familiar, and it didn’t seem like the sort of thing Pepper usually wore, but until I saw this picture I’d forgotten you had them. And the scarf. It wasn’t a tie that got caught in the bedpost, it was a yellow and black silk scarf, the one you used to wear all the time.”
She took another sip of wine and gazed at me impassively over the rim of the glass. “My, you’re clever.”
I didn’t feel clever; I felt sick. “But why?”
“I had to,” she said simply. “Pepper was going to destroy everything I had. Everything I’d always wanted and worked so hard to get.” With a feeble smile, Daria picked up the wine bottle, “Come on, we might as well go outside and enjoy the fresh air.”
I unwrapped the cheese, plopped it on the plate next to the crackers, grabbed my glass and followed her out onto the patio.
“She was having an affair with Jim, but I guess you know that.”
“Only since yesterday.”
“I found out a month ago when I discovered a note from her in Jim’s shirt pocket. I hired a detective and had them followed. Got pictures and everything.” She cut herself a wedge of cheese and then leaned toward me. “People like that,” she said, in a tone somewhere between disgust and disbelief, “people like that make me sick.”
“People like who?”
“Like Pepper. Rich, beautiful, selfish, used to getting their own way—they think they can just take whatever they want.”
“You’re not being fair, Daria; Jim had something to do with it, too.”
She shook her head. “No, you don’t understand Jim. Oh, he went along with it obviously, but Pepper seduced him; beguiled him with her phony charm and empty- headed femininity. He would never have looked twice at another woman without some pretty strong encouragement.”
I shut my eyes, willing things to be as they were not. The reality that faced me was incomprehensible. “At this point it doesn’t really matter what Pepper did or didn’t do. You killed her, Daria. You murdered someone.”
Her eyes were fixed on something off in the distance, but I could see the glimmer of tears at their comers. Her mouth trembled.
“I know,” she said, so softly I had to strain to hear her, “but I couldn’t stand to lose Jim. To be one of those pathetic, middle-aged women with nothing.” She began to cry in earnest. “Pepper had so much. It wasn’t fair she wanted Jim, too.”
A numbing sadness settled over me like a heavy cloak, and I squeezed her hand, wishing there was something I could say. For some time we sat in silence, gazing at the hills behind her house, golden in the light of the setting sun. Good friends sharing a quiet moment, a bottle of wine—and a terrible secret.
Finally Daria dried the last of her tears. “It’s odd,” she said, “but nothing about that night
seems real to me. I can remember what happened, but it’s far away, washed in a pale light. Like a dream or something.”
I poured us both a second glass of wine, figuring we could use a little dreamlike unreality at that moment. “How did you even get into Pepper’s house?” I asked, thinking that maybe if I focused on the mechanics of the murder, the terrible reality of it would remain in the shadows.
“It was so easy. Chris had a key from the time Pepper and Robert were in Hawaii, when he watered their house- plants and fed their cat. He had the alarm code, too. I knew if I turned off the alarm and opened a window I could make it look like a burglary. You know . . . warm night, window open, some drug addict wanders through, steals enough for his next fix, and in the process, kills Pepper.”
“But Pepper always set the alarm. If Robert hadn’t been drinking that night, he’d have remembered it wasn’t on when he got in.”
“I’m sure,” she said in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “that even Pepper occasionally slipped up.”
I ignored her disdain. “She might have heard you, though.”
Daria picked at her nail polish. “That afternoon I dropped off some samples of the fudge I was planning to bake for the festival. I wanted her to taste them, tell me which ones she liked best.”
The details Michael had told me that first morning came rushing back. “And you laced the fudge with sleeping pills,” I said, finishing for her.
Daria smiled self-consciously. “Right I even persuaded her to give Kimberly some, although it was a fight. You know how Pepper was about sweets.” She ran a finger around the rim of her wine glass. “The only problem was, Pepper didn’t eat enough of the stuff. God, she was such a freak about food, I should have laced her carrot juice instead. I expected her to be out cold, but when I bumped against the bed that night, she woke up and began fighting me. She was groggy, of course, and disoriented, but it was enough to throw everything off. It was supposed to be quick and clean—no commotion, no blood—just shove a pillow over her face and be gone.”
Daria hesitated, and I waited for another round of tears as the memory of that awful night played again in her head. But instead Daria looked almost amused. “Maybe it’s better this way, though. If things had gone the way I planned, Pepper would never have realized I was the victor. You should have seen her expression! For once in her life, somebody had gotten the better of her.” Daria leaned closer and whispered, “She wasn’t so beautiful, you know, without makeup. Her eyes were kind of small, and her skin was splotchy.”
Instinctively, I pulled away, shrinking as much from the image of Pepper’s vulnerability as from Daria’s delight in its discovery. “So you hit her with that rabbit statue,” I continued, for her, “and then hid it in Robert’s closet.”
“No. As I said, Pepper’s being awake surprised me. It threw everything off. When I grabbed the statue I wasn’t wearing gloves. I was afraid my fingerprints were on it, so I took it with me. But then when the police were running out of leads, and you mentioned Robert didn’t have an alibi for that night, well . . . it just seemed to come together. I went back to the house and hid the silly thing in his closet. I washed it very carefully, of course, except for the blood. I wanted the police to be able to connect it with Pepper’s death.”
“No wonder Michael was upset that he’d missed it the first time.”
She laughed, an odd, delighted kind of laugh. “I was hoping you’d persuade him to keep an eye on Robert, search the house again and stuff, but you did even better. Really, Kate, poking around in Robert’s closet, that must have taken a lot of nerve. Weren’t you scared?”
“Frightened out of my wits.”
“Of course, turns out it was all a waste after all. Who’d have thought he’d pull in a bunch of queers as witnesses?”
Standing, she stretched her arms high above her head, as though she’d been seated for hours. “You know, I appreciate your help in discovering the rabbit, but I wish you’d left it at that. Everything would have been fine if you hadn’t gone sticking your nose in where it didn’t belong. This would have been one of those cases that fades quietly into history. The leads dry up, some new crisis hits and the police stop searching. Pretty soon no one even remembers.” She turned and looked into my face. “You really screwed things up, Kate.”
I caught myself on the verge of apologizing.
“It may still be okay, though. The police will have a hard time proving I did it. And if you tell them, I’ll deny everything.”
Just then a faint rustling came from the bushes at the side of the yard. Like young girls at a slumber party, we clasped hands and moved close to each other. An instant later, Michael emerged from the darkness.
There was a moment of absolute stillness during which we both stared at him, wide-eyed. Then a look of recognition flashed in Daria’s eyes. She dropped my hand and swirled to stare at me, her face contorted with rage.
“You bitch, you traitor. You set me up! And here I thought you were my friend. ”
Before I could explain, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a gun. A very small, surprisingly delicate- looking weapon that glimmered silver in the twilight. “Don’t move, either one of you,” she said sharply. “Now raise your hands above your head, Lieutenant, and step forward very slowly.”
Keeping his eyes on Daria, Michael stepped onto the brick patio. “Are you okay, Kate?”
“I was until you showed up.”
He managed a faint grin. “When I realized it couldn’t have been Jim, I got worried about you.”
“Keep quiet,” Daria snapped, stepping around the edge of the table so that she faced us both. “Kate, get his gun. And don’t even think of trying anything.” When I hesitated, she added, “You do have a gun don’t you, Lieutenant? Maybe even two.”
“Just one,” he said. “It’s in a holster on my left shoulder.”
“Go on, Kate, get it.”
I looked uneasily at Michael.
“It’s okay. And she’s right, don’t try anything foolish.”
Was this some cryptic code for “Make a move, but make it a sensible one?” If so, we were in trouble. Maybe if I’d watched more of those macho shoot-’em-ups Andy loved I might have been able to come up with some plan of attack. But whatever cleverness and ingenuity I possessed had deserted me the moment I saw the gun.
Weak-kneed, I inched toward Michael and reached under his jacket. Even through the material of his shirt, I could feel the heat of his skin and the rapid beating of his heart. Apparently his fear was as real as my own, which did not do a lot to reassure me. Finally, I retrieved the gun, holding it away from me the way I might a dead mouse.
“Set it down over here on the table,” Daria said evenly.
I did as she asked, then stepped back. “Someone saw your car that night,” I told her, “by the Dumpster. The police will get you eventually. If you kill us it will only be worse.”
“Shut up, Kate. You’re the one who caused all this trouble.”
Me? I thought. I started to argue with her, but Michael interrupted. “Take it easy, Daria. Think this through.” His voice was soft, calm, almost as though he were talking to a recalcitrant child. I guess in the police academy they teach you how to hide your terror. “Pepper’s murder was clever, but this ... You’re not going to be able to get away with this so easily.”
“You don’t leave me a lot of choices, do you, Lieutenant?”
“Cooperate with us. Don’t dig yourself in deeper.” He paused and offered her a smile. “Why don’t you at least let Kate go. She didn’t set you up—she didn’t even know I was anywhere near here. She only wanted to help you.”
“Sure. You think I’m going to believe that? Anyway, it doesn’t make much difference at this point.”
“This is crazy,” I squeaked. “There—”
Daria’s eyes flashed. “Just shut up! I need to think.” She bit her lips thoughtfully. “Get his necktie, Kate, and bind his hands behind his back. Better yet, tie him to th
e basketball pole.” She shifted closer to watch my moves with an eagle eye.
I tied Michael’s hands as loosely as I dared, but I knew it didn’t really make a difference. She wasn’t planning on leaving us unattended; she only wanted to curtail any sudden movement on his part. Michael never took his eyes off Daria and we didn’t speak, but when I wrapped the tie around his wrists, he reached for my hand and squeezed it gently with his own.
When I was finished, Daria inspected my handiwork, then resumed her position across the table from us. I noticed that her hands had begun to tremble and she was breathing hard. I glanced at Michael, but he appeared as unruffled as ever.
“This is going to be kind of hard for you to explain,” he observed.
Daria shook her head. “I’m thinking. I could always claim I mistook you for an intruder, sneaking up through my garden at night. There has just been a murder in town, don’t forget. A lady has every reason to be nervous. Kate will be harder to explain, but I’ll think of something you can be sure.” The edges of her mouth turned up in a quiet smirk. “Maybe I’ll even kill her with your gun.”
I felt suddenly sick. “Daria, please, you can’t do this.”
“Want to make a bet?” With one quick, crazed, glance in my direction, she raised the gun and pointed it directly at Michael. I leaped for her arm just as she fired, but I was a fraction of a second too late. I heard Michael groan and then slump to the ground.
“Damn you, Kate,” she shrieked, kicking me in the shins. She wrenched her arm free and brought the gun down on the back of my neck, sending a wave of pain through my head. “You just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?”
As we struggled, we knocked over a chair and I fell, scraping my mouth and cheek on a piece of jagged metal. But I held Daria’s wrists tightly and pulled her down with me, hitting my shoulder against the hard brick. There was a brief period where we rolled and thrashed and clawed at each other. Then she heaved herself up and slapped me hard in the face. I tried to scream, but her knee was pressing hard against my stomach so that I had trouble even breathing. And then, in the soft evening light, I saw the dainty little gun just six inches from my face.
Murder Among Neighbors (The Kate Austen Mystery Series) Page 24